Clearly you didn’t grew in Barcelona, or Paris, or London, …
Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.
I agree that transportation here has many issues and I absolutely hate it, but when I was a kid [0] I could get to school fine with the suburban train. My classmates had no issue getting there with the bus (regular, not school bus).
> Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.
Sure, I can tell it from the Paris metro, too. The reason is that people tend to go away on vacation. This also explains the usual spikes in traffic jams the weekend right at the start and at the end of vacations.
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[0] I'm in my thirties, so that wasn't a long time ago
Before that, schools tend to be denser. Because I had to attend some special classes, I couldn't go to my local school and needed to go a further one. It was a 30-minute walk.
Normally, kids would go to their local schools, of which I passed one on my way. My local one was in the opposite direction, 2 minutes away from my house.
At least in Paris itself, only a third of homes have cars, and in this third, not everyone is going to bring its children to school using it.
Sure, maybe in smaller cities that’s a problem, but honestly if you’re choosing to drive round London then you’re taking a massively suboptimal method of transport.
Of course, public transport shouldn't be necessary for most city kids, which ought to have a school in walking and certainly biking[1] distance. It'd be interesting to see the distribution of distance to school in different locations and for different years. Increases in suburbanization are bound to increase the average distance to school; but rural kids even in my generation and more so in my parents and grandparents generation managed much longer commutes without a car as a matter of course.
[1] Maybe kids use the bike less since there's a perception that it's gotten more dangerous. A perception that's not totally wrong, at least in Germany: the number of bike accidents has increased from ~74k in 2000 to 87k in 2019[2], though at least the number of fatal accidents decreased in the same time.
[2] Table 1.1 https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Verkeh...
Yes, kids that already live in the city won’t obviously get taken to school by car, but most good schools in the periphery better have a way to handle the cars.